Nashville the Hotspot for Music Industry Jobs

According to a new report, Nashville is easily the hotspot for music industry jobs in the country. Since we call the city’s famed Music Row our home, we’re pretty proud to see our city on the top of the heap, though we’re not necessarily surprised.

Nashville has 27,000 music jobs, meaning that 7.8 of every 1,000 residents work in the music industry, according to new Economic Modeling Specialty International (EMSI) data via Billboard. For comparison, Los Angeles comes in second in the nation using this metric, with 2.8 per 1,000 residents working in the music industry.

It should be noted, of course, that both L.A. and New York have more actual music jobs, but obviously have much larger populations. Nashville, however, has remained a bright spot in the music industry job landscape for many decades.

In fact, between 1970 and 2006, Nashville was the only city in the country to see positive growth among music city jobs. It seems that while most industries are seeing jobs become more spread out, particularly with the widespread implementation of the internet allowing employees in many positions to work from anywhere, this hasn’t held true in the music industry. The growth in music jobs seemed to concentrate to a smaller number of cities, with many of the jobs going to Nashville.

But the music jobs in Nashville go far beyond the music industry, which is what really makes us proud to make Music City home. Those 27,000 jobs earn $1.7 billion in income, which in turn contributes $5.5 billion to the local economy.

It’s long seemed apparent that many music jobs that previously seemed to be regulated to New York and Los Angeles have been redirected to Nashville, but it’s nice to see some data not only confirming this trend, but also providing a further snapshot of the climate of music jobs in the city.

If you’re still not convinced that Nashville is a great place to work in the music industry, consider the following statistics, also from the report: the average music job earnings in Nashville is 156% of the average salary in the U.S. This is second to only L.A., where earnings are 175 percent of the national average. For more comparison, New York is 147 percent, Chicago is 113 percent, Austin is 94 percent and Atlanta is 85 percent.

Additionally, the cost of living in our town is about 11.1 percent below the national average, while Los Angeles is 131 percent of the national average and New York is 125 percent. These numbers are according to the ACCRA Cost of Living Index.